The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (48 page)

Mrs. Beti Gould, preschool and kindergarten

Mr. Giovanni Mucci, third grade

Mr. Bob Moses, eighth grade and eleventh grade

Mrs. Marie King Johnson, eleventh and twelfth grade

Professor Andrew Hoffman, freshman year of college

CHAPTER 8:
HOW TO RUIN (OR INSPIRE) A KID

PRIMARY SOURCES

Csikszentmihályi, Mihály, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen.
Talented Teenagers
. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Gardner, Howard. “Do Parents Count?”
New York Review of Books
, November 5, 1998.

Harper, Lawrence V. “Epigenetic inheritance and the intergenerational transfer of experience.”
Psychological Bulletin
131, no. 3 (2005): 340–60.

Harris, Judith Rich.
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
. Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Turkheimer, Eric. “Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
9, no. 5 (October 2000): 160–64.

CHAPTER NOTES

    
Do we know how many geniuses are never recognized
:
Csikszentmihályi, Rathunde, and Whalen,
Talented Teenagers
, p. 2.

    
In 1999, Oregon neuroscientist John C
.
Crabbe led a study: Crabbe, Wahlsten, and Dudek, “Genetics of mouse behavior,” pp. 1670–72.

    
This was unforeseen, and it turned heads
.

Google Scholar shows 556 scientific articles/books referencing this one article.

    
What we do know is that our brains and bodies are primed for plasticity
.

In
Resiliency
, Bonnie Benard writes, “Findings over this past decade [point] to the plasticity of the human brain (Bruer, 1999; Diamond & Hopson, 1998; Ericsson et al., 1998; Kagan, 1998). As Daniel Goleman notes in his discussion of the “protean brain,” the “finding that the brain and nervous system generate new cells as learning or repeated experiences dictate has put the theme of plasticity [
emphasis added
] at the front and center of neuroscience” (2003, p. 334). Unfortunately, what the public has been left with instead, warns prominent developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan, is the “seductive” notion of “infant determinism” (1998).

Benard’s Citations

Benard, Bonnie.
Resiliency: What We Have Learned
. WestEd, 2004.

Bruer, J.
The Myth of the First Three Years
. Free Press, 1999.

Diamond, M., and J. L. Hopson.
Magic Trees of the Mind: How to Nurture Your Child’s Intelligence, Creativity, and Healthy Emotions from Birth Through Adolescence
. Penguin, 1999.

Kagan, J.
Three Seductive Ideas
. Harvard University Press, 1998.

Goleman, Daniel.
Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama
. Bantam, 2003.

    
“Recent reviews of pre- and postnatal brain
”:
Johnson and Karmiloff-Smith, “Neuroscience Perspectives on Infant Development,” p. 123. This entire chapter is highly recommended, and may be accessed online via Google Books. Go to “Contents,” and click on page 121.

    
“Human babies are special
”:
Meltzoff, “Theories of People and Things.”

    
Musical ability lies dormant in all of us, calling for early and sustained incantation
.

See earlier note “Levitin also concurs with University of California, San Diego’s Diana Deutsch” on page 231.

    
Based on our reading of these interactions, we then tailor her environment accordingly
.

In his landmark book
Touchpoints
, pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton writes:

There are wide individual differences in the style in which a baby handles responses to stimuli around him, in his need for sleep and his crying. Babies differ in how they can be soothed, as well as in their responses to hunger and discomfort, to exposure to temperature changes, to handling, and to interaction with caregivers. The task for parents … [is] to watch and listen for their own baby’s particular style. (Brazelton,
Touchpoints
, 1992.)

    
Challenging assumptions is always healthy, and in one sense Harris’s book was a welcome critique that forced university psychologists out of their comfort zone
.

Howard Gardner writes:

As Harris shrewdly points out, there are two problems with the nurture assumption. First, when viewed with a critical eye, the empirical evidence about parental influences on their children is weak, and often equivocal. After hundreds of studies, many with individually suggestive findings, it is still difficult to pinpoint the strong effects that parents have on their children. Even the effects of the most extreme experiences—divorce, adoption, and abuse—prove elusive to capture. Harris cites Eleanor Maccoby, one of the leading researchers
in the field, who concluded that “in a study of nearly four hundred families, few connections were found between parental child-rearing practices (as reported by parents in detailed interviews) and independent assessments of children’s personality characteristics—so few, indeed, that virtually nothing was published relating the two sets of data.” (Gardner, “Do Parents Count?”)

    
“Genes contain the instructions for producing a physical body and a physical brain
”:
Harris,
The Nurture Assumption
, p. 30.

    
“non-shared” environment—a term proposed by geneticist Robert Plomin to explain not-yet-understood environmental influences
.

Catherine Baker writes:

The well-known geneticist Robert Plomin and a colleague first posed this question in an article published in 1987 (R. Plomin and D. Daniels 1987,
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
10: 1–60). They proposed this answer: the differences result from aspects of the environment that siblings raised together do not share. They termed this the non-shared environment. So, for example, socioeconomic status such as poverty would be a shared environmental influence while illness, specific traumatic events, or parental attitudes towards each individual child would be non-shared environmental influences. The concept of a non-shared environment launched a wave of studies seeking to identify the variables within a family environment that differ for each sibling. (Baker, Report on Eric Turkheimer’s presentation “Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean”; Baker references Plomin and Daniels, “Why are children in the same family so different from one another?” pp. 1–60.)

    
Two years after her book came out, though, it turned out that there was a problem with the shared/non-shared paradigm
.
An analysis in 2000 by the University of Virginia’s Eric Turkheimer revealed that it was another false distinction. Just like “nature/nurture” was supposed to separate genetic effects from environmental effects, “shared” and “non-shared” implied that it was either/or: either people would have similar reactions to shared experiences
or
they would have different reactions to non-shared experiences. Turkheimer’s powerful meta-analysis revealed the much more common third possibility: most of the time, kids have different reactions to shared experiences.

From Turkheimer’s paper:

Again and again, Plomin and his colleagues have emphasized that the importance of nonshared environment implies that it is time to abandon shared
environmental variables as possible explanations of developmental outcomes. And although modern environmentalists might not miss coarse measures like socioeconomic status, it is quite another thing to give up on the causal efficaciousness of normal families, as Scarr (1992), Rowe (1994), and Harris (1998) have urged. If, however, nonshared environmental variability in outcome is the result of the unsystematic consequences of both shared and nonshared environmental events, the field faces formidable methodological problems—Plomin and Daniels’s gloomy prospect—but need not conclude that aspects of families children share with siblings are of no causal importance. (Turkheimer, “Three laws of behavior genetics and what they mean.”)

    
Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner had an even more fundamental problem with Harris’s notion of uninfluential parents
.
“When we consider the empirical part of Harris’s argument,” he wrote in the
New York Review of Books
, “we find it is indeed true that the research on parent-child socialization is not what we would hope for. However, this says less about parents and children and more about the state of psychological research, particularly with reference to ‘softer variables’ such as affection and ambition. While psychologists have made genuine progress in the study of visual perception and measurable progress in the study of cognition, we do not really know what to look for or how to measure human personality traits, individual emotions, and motivations, let alone character.”

Gardner continues:

Consider, as an example, the categories that the respondents must use when they describe themselves or others on the Personal Attributes Questionnaire … [They] are asked whether they would describe themselves as Gentle, Helpful, Active, Competitive, and Worldly. These terms are not easy to define and people are certainly prone to apply them favorably to their own case. Or consider the list of acts from which observers can choose to characterize children from different cultures—Offers Help, Acts Sociably, Assaults Sociably, Seeks Dominance … We don’t know with any confidence what these acts mean to children, adolescents, and adults in diverse cultures. (Gardner, “Do Parents Count?”)

    
“I would give much weight to the hundreds of studies pointing toward parental influence and to the folk wisdom accumulated by hundreds of societies over thousands of years
.
”

At this point in his paper, Gardner adds his own footnote:

Make that one more. To be published in February 1999 is Frank Furstenberg et al.,
Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success
(University of Chicago Press). Directly countering a claim by Harris, this sociological study indicates that neighborhood has surprisingly little effect on the relative success or failure achieved by adolescents. Rather, consistent with common sense and many other psychological and sociological studies, the research team finds that the parents of successful adolescents “continued to be active agents looking out for their children’s interests throughout adolescence.” They knew which resources were available and used them, they encouraged some interests and discouraged others, they organized family activities, spent informal time with the youngsters, and knew enough to cut the youths a certain amount of slack. (Gardner, “Do Parents Count?”)

    
So yes, parents matter
.
Parenting isn’t everything or the only thing. Parents don’t have anything close to complete control and in most cases should not shoulder all the blame when things don’t turn out well. But parenting does matter.

Lawrence Harper points out a favorite study supporting this argument:

On the one hand, the evidence clearly shows that parenting influences do matter. For example, Sroufe (2002) reported striking results from a long-term longitudinal study of low-socioeconomic-status families. He found that early quality of care predicted a range of later outcomes including competence in peer relations, adolescent risk taking, emotional problems, and school success. In the latter case, a composite of six measures of quality of parenting, the home environment, and the quality of stimulation afforded the child could predict high school dropout with 77% accuracy. (Harper, “Epigenetic inheritance and the intergenerational transfer of experience,” pp. 340–60.)

    
“Isn’t that something of an accomplishment?
”:
Suzuki,
Nurtured by Love
, p. 1.

    
He came to quickly believe, in fact, that early musical training has an overwhelming advantage over later training, and that it was a gateway to an enlightened life
.

Suzuki friend and biographer Evelyn Hermann gives us the following quote from him: “I am not very interested in doing ‘repair’ work on people who can play already,” he wrote to a fellow instructor in 1945. “What I want to try is infant education.” (Hermann,
Shinichi Suzuki
, p. 38.)

    
“talent is not inherent or inborn, but trained and educated
”:
Hermann,
Shinichi Suzuki
, p. 40.

    
his Talent Education Research Institute had thirty-five branches in Japan and was teaching fifteen hundred children
:
“Personal History of Shinichi Suzuki.”

    
The Suzuki method became a sensation around the world and helped transform our understanding of young children’s capabilities
.

   In his 1969 autobiography, Suzuki relayed the story of Peeko the coughing parakeet: